NaNoWriMo (writing a novel from November 1-30)

[Serpent]

But for me, to write 50,000 [L1] words takes up all my non-sleeping/eating/working time.

I don't understand how it's possible for it not to Is there any success story that doesn't involve sleep deprivation?

[arthaey]

But for me, to write 50,000 [L1] words takes up all my non-sleeping/eating/working time.

I don't understand how it's possible for it not to Is there any success story that doesn't involve sleep deprivation?

Some WriMos are very experienced writers, or just fast writers, and they finish ridiculously quickly. Like, done in a week, so they make their goal 200,000 words kind of ridiculous. We are honor-bound to hate* these people.

* and by "hate" I mean "be in awe, filled with jealousy and/or admiration"

[arthaey]

Here's a short list of resources that I've found useful int he past. (I've also added them to the end of the first post in this thread.)

• No Plot? No Problem!, the canonical book by Chris Baty that started it all. Light-hearted, encouraging, great for getting into the "spirit" of NaNoWriMo. [English]
  
  
• Writing Excuses, a podcast by published authors Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, & Howard Tayler with tons of 15-episodes full of great advice and inspiration [English]
  
  
• official NaNo forums, where you can get lots of encouragement, commiseration, plot & character help.

But beware, it's easy to spend your time researching about instead of actually writing! (Ask me how I know. )

[arthaey]

If anyone has non-English fiction-writing resources to share, please do!

[arthaey]

Welp, it's official now: I've ordered my 2016 NaNoWriMo shirt. I'm definitely participating this year!

[Spoonary]

But beware, it's easy to spend your time researching about instead of actually writing! (Ask me how I know. )

Replace 'writing' with 'language learning' and I'm sure we're all guilty as charged!

[Iversen]

I have only seen this thread now, and being a nerd with a tendency to count things I read about the NaNoWriMo idea on the website(s) mentioned earlier in this thread. In the original US setup all participants were writing in their native language English, and then 50.000 words in a month doesn't seem totally out of reach - especially given that English has a tendency to use separate words instead of compounds à la German. Writing in a target language where you may have to look things up is a totally different story, and a pledge to write 50.000 in a shaky target language means much more work than writing 50.000 in your own language.

Afterwards I started thinking in quantitative terms about my own productivity. My Guide to learning Languages version 3 (which is buried somewhere in the forgotten underworld of this forum) contains around 67.000 words, and it was compiled in January this year, so that's around the amount of text you have to produce to make a NaNoWriMo . However some parts are taken more or less directly from the version on HTLAL, so even besides not being fictional this guide doesn't qualify (the NaNoWriMo rules do permit revised 'loans', but I think it's against the spirit of the project).

I also checked my thread about Google Translate which was written from scratch during 4 days in August, but based on a lecture I gave in May. It contains around 7000 words, so if I had been able to continue writing at that speed for a whole month it would have reached the 50.000 word limit. But I would not have examples and complaints enough to fill out the space. And it is not fiction.

However these texts were in English, and I couldn't see myself doing 50.000 words for ONE work in a month in any of my other second languages. Instead I have another relevant number to quote, namely the wordcount for my messages here at Language-Learners, which partly are written in weak or even extremely weak languages. I keep a copy of my log and some other messages (mostly the long ones) in a series of Word files, and the current file was started August 3 - i.e. around 43 days ago. There are 14.534 words in it, but some of them are written by 'guests' in my log thread, others are from quotes - they should be excluded from the count. On the other hand I have only kept some messages from outside the log thread so it would probably be fair to say that I have written at least 10.000 words here during one month - albeit at least half of them in English. Add maybe half that for my papir bin writings, and I'm still far from the coveted benchmark of 50.000 words.

So if any of you can manage to reach 50.000 words in a month in ONE work in a target language then you have my full admiration!

[arthaey]

Iversen, you're entirely right that this is an even bigger challenge in a non-fluent language. It works out to 1,667 words per day, which is a lot without adding L2-ness to the mix. As I've only "won" NaNo once even in English, I'm not going to beat myself up for not hitting the goal in Spanish. But I will try!

I'm planning to keep in mind the spirit of NaNo, which is to expect your zero-ith draft (because it doesn't even count as a first draft yet) to be crap. But since you'll pretty much never write a non-crappy first (or zero-ith) draft, you might as well get the crap over with so you can move on to either improving it or discovering in "just" a month's time that the story idea wasn't worth more time anyway.

Kinda like how you have to go through the halty, error-filled, bumbly beginner stage in language-learning before you can hope to reach fluency.

So not only do I expect there to be crappy storytelling problems, but also crappy L2 issues. I'll look up better synonyms in December. I'll double-check my por vs para in December. I'll fix up preterite vs imperfect tenses in December. November is the month to write! write like the wind!

[arthaey]

I have only seen this thread now, and being a nerd with a tendency to count things I read about the NaNoWriMo idea on the website(s) mentioned earlier in this thread. [...] Afterwards I started thinking in quantitative terms about my own productivity.

Fortuitously, I just wrote a rather long log post in Spanish and I timed it (for studying-time–tracking purposes).

It was ~200 words in 14 minutes, or ~14 words/minute. With a goal of 1,667 words/day, that would be 119 minutes/day, or just shy of 2 hours/day — which is actually right in line with what my experience with English NaNoWriMo is, and exactly what my original Spanish goal of "2-3 hours/day" was.

So your post made me second-guess myself, and hard data made me feel confident again. Or at least like I'm only reasonably insane, not irredeemably insane.

In the original US setup all participants were writing in their native language English, and then 50.000 words in a month doesn't seem totally out of reach - especially given that English has a tendency to use separate words instead of compounds à la German.

There must be statistics out there on the average ratio between languages (written natively, not in translation, which tends to "bulk up"). I wonder if any WriMos adjust the English goal of 50,000 to take that into account? I certainly wouldn't blame anyone here on the forum for doing that, that's for sure!

[Spoonary]

In the spirit of writing "like the wind" in November, what happens if you don't know a word in your target language? Would you take the time to look it up or would you just write the word in English (/your native language) and carry on?